The Hodel 3000 Compliant Logger outputs like SyslogLogger (seattlerb.rubyforge.org/SyslogLogger/), except it doesn’t need a syslog daemon running, such that your log come out exactly like syslog logs.

Mostly, this is intended to let you use tools that assume your log are in this syslog format, including:

• Rails Analyzer Tools: rails-analyzer.rubyforge.org/

• oink: github.com/noahd1/oink

See initial announcement here: nubyonrails.com/articles/a-hodel-3000-compliant-logger-for-the-rest-of-us

gem install hodel_3000_compliant_logger

The main thing hodel_3000_complaint_logger provides is the Hodel3000ComplaintLogger class. It’s a subclass of Logger (ruby-doc.org/core/classes/Logger.html), so you can use it as you would any Logger, really, except it outputs slightly different.

require 'hodel_3000_compliant_logger'
log = Hodel3000ComplaintLogger.new(STDOUT)
log.level = Logger::WARN

log.debug("Created logger")
log.info("Program started")
log.warn("Nothing to do!")

Most likely, you’ll want to use it to replace the builtin Rails logger, by updating config/environment.rb:

Rails::Initializer.run do |config|

config.gem 'hodel_3000_compliant_logger'
begin
  require 'hodel_3000_compliant_logger'
  config.logger = Hodel3000CompliantLogger.new(config.log_path)
rescue
  $stderr.puts "Hodel3000CompliantLogger unavailable, oink will be disabled"
end

end

Note, the block inside Rails::Initializer runs before you environment is fully loaded, so you need this in a begin/rescue block so ‘rake gems:install` doesn’t fall on its face.

If you are using FastCGI, you may need to hard-code the hostname instead of using Socket.gethostname

Geoffrey Grosenbach, with help from Eric Hodel

topfunky.com

• Nov 29, 2007: Improvements and spec from Chris Bernard [logicleaf.com/]